The Power of Sadness: Finding Value in the Presence of Opposites

The true value of things appears in the presence of their opposites. We crave for a point of light when darkness prevails, and good deeds become an influential presence when evil spreads, and we long for joy and happiness when sadness prevails. And in a world dominated by many disturbances of joy, holidays become opportunities to recover our humanity away from the causes of sadness and chagrin, which exist in abundance. In the conditions of those around you, on television screens, in airports and hospitals, and in our souls, which, no matter how happy and laughing they may seem, have sensitive points to stimulate sadness, which are quick to react, do not get damaged, but on the contrary, get stronger with time. Some of them say that sadness in the prime of life is a tourist. With age, he builds his palaces and obtains eternal legitimacy.
And in this what Sheikh “Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi” himself had talked about sarcastically – when one of the mourners said to him about the death of his friend, “The last of sorrows, our master” – .. (Who are we without sorrows? How can we secure ourselves without them, not to get lost in the valleys of heedlessness Like a lost sheep? I do not like sadness for the soul of the Sufi, and I do not hate it for the soul of the ignorant who is deified by the world. God shows me on the way sadness after sadness).
This is how the novelist Muhammad Hassan Alwan described in his novel “A Small Death” the opinion of Sheikh Ibn Arabi, and his visions in “sadness.” And because I am not in the process of judging that, the matter has its people and their explanations, but I really wonder, is there an invitation to normalize this, or is it an invitation to deal with that?
There are souls who do not surrender to sadness, do not accept it at all, but rather resist it, fight it fiercely and with all weapons, and reject it even if it is a tourist. They declare their own revolution against all the structures of sadness within them, uprooting them and planting in their place sprouts of hope that water them with joys that were, and others in the hope that they will come.
Ibn al-Arabi used to see grief as “awakening of the heart” and in changing conditions a wisdom from God, a test and a purification of the heart, and this is the essence of what is meant. Changing conditions is a condition for life, so neither continuous sadness nor continuous joy is “reliable”… but it is a right that you must not miss.